


Patience

by down



Series: Scenes from a long recovery [2]
Category: Magic Knight Rayearth
Genre: Multi, and then Eagle pushes himself too hard, because he's Eagle and he doesn't know how to do anything else, but he has people about him who are watching out for him pulling this kind of thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 04:36:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12833412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/down/pseuds/down
Summary: Eagle hadn’t been prepared for how often he was going to be told, in no uncertain terms, that he wasn’t allowed to ‘work through it’ and that he had to rest, slow down, bepatient.





	Patience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shinomu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinomu/gifts).



> Written for Shinomu in the Rayearth holiday fic-swap 2016, and I promised a part 2 to come. ...I'm still writing that bit. Sorry! But I figured it was time to get this up anyway.

oOo

Eagle had known that once he woke up, there would be some recovery time. He'd certainly been told it often enough. After it took a couple of years to wake up, he was fully aware it was going to be hard work to get himself back in shape. He just hadn’t been prepared for _how_ long it would take. (The fact it was years asleep rather than days should have been a hint, probably, but he was - well - asleep for all that, even the bits where he was conscious enough to ‘talk’ with people. It hadn’t felt as long from the inside as it must have done for everyone waiting outside his head.)

Mostly, he hadn’t been prepared for how often he was going to be told, in no uncertain terms, that he wasn’t allowed to ‘work through it’ and that he had to rest, slow down, be _patient_.

Patience was all well and good as a strategy in a conflict - waiting for the opportune moment to act, for the enemy to grow complacent… Patience with his own limitations, though? He’d spent his whole life ignoring his limitations in a pretty decent effort at overcoming them.

The Master Healer of Cephiro glared at him, her hands on her hips. “Yes, that was a pretty decent go at managing to kill yourself before you even reached adulthood, congratulations on wreaking your health so successfully.”

“That’s not-” Eagle started, and sighed when she glared harder at him. He had, perhaps, overdone things a little trying to make his legs obey him, and was feeling like a wrung-out cloth that had been used to scrub down the FTO after a battle - full of rust and corrosive chemicals.

“If you don’t want another year-long nap, you’ll stay in bed for the next week and _then_ , _if_ I think you are recovered enough, you can try walking again, half an hour a day. And I’m taking the support bars out of your room to keep the temptation away. Understood?”

Eagle sighed deeper this time, as the handrails that he’d been using to keep himself mostly upright in his walking sessions vanished in a fizzle of light. The worst of it was, he knew she was right - he hadn’t felt this bad since the month after he’d woken up, and that was after staying in bed a whole day since he'd collapsed back onto it yesterday. Which only made him feel grumpier. “Are you like this with all of your patients?”

Miura snorted. “I told the Guru he had to stay in bed for a fortnight, year before last.”

“…Did he do it?”

“He translocated himself still in his bed to the next council meeting,” Miura said, rolling her eyes. She sat on the side of Eagle’s bed, holding a hand out in a request for his wrist; he held his arm out to her. “We are still debating whether that counts. Loudly.”

Eagle knew Clef pretty well by now (he had the best stories about Lantis’s childhood, and was happy to trade them for stories of Lantis in Autozam), and he could imagine the arguments. He was still snickering when Miura set his arm back on the bed. “Am I really going to have to stay in bed for a week?”

“If you recover well enough, I’ll let you as far as the windowseat in a few days,” she offered, and he tried hard not to sigh again. Miura patted his arm. “I understand this is frustrating, but even if we were only trying to rebuild your body’s strength, it would not do to overdo things. As it is… we are treating your condition the same way as we would a mage who has burnt themselves out, and it has been working so far. The biggest risk is overloading yourself and losing everything you have learnt so far; Cephiro is trying to heal you, but if learning to walk puts too much strain on you she may well decide to ‘heal’ the progress you have made - return your mind to the state it was in before the strain, erasing the pathways you are working to build.”

Closing his eyes, Eagle took one deep breath and held it for a count of seven before letting it out slowly, consciously relaxing as he did so. By the time he was done, the irritation had mostly slipped away, leaving resignation in it’s stead. “I promise I will behave,” he said, and Miura patted his arm again before leaving him be.

The room was emptier than ever when she had gone, without the bulk of the handrails to fill up the floor, and none of the books by his bedside interested him enough to deal with reading Cephiran texts. (He could do it, but it was slow. Autozam didn’t make hardcopy books anymore, hadn’t for years, and he was certainly not going to be allowed a datapad any time soon; Cephiran books were the only option he was being offered.) So he turned his head into the pillows, closed his eyes, and gave up on the day.

oOo

He woke to a room painted gold and pink with the sunset, and a steady rhythm beating below his head. He curled closer into Lantis’s side without opening his eyes, worming an arm about the other man’s waist but otherwise staying right where he was.

Lantis readjusted the covers with the arm not wrapped about Eagle, but didn’t say anything, not about the glaring absence of the recovery equipment nor the fact Eagle hadn’t taken afternoon naps in nearly a month. The occasional rustle of pages turning was enough to fill the silence, and without meaning to Eagle drifted back off to sleep again.

oOo

The sun was down when he woke again, Lantis still in bed with him, but the door creaking open. Hikaru had an uncanny ability for visiting on days when he needed cheering up; this evening she was still in her school uniform, heavy bag over her shoulder and a tray full of food in her hands. “I hope you don’t mind me turning up, but I’ve got all this reading to do for tomorrow, and everyone at home is out - I was going to fall asleep over my books! I brought cake to make up for it?” She smiled, and Eagle managed a real smile in return.

“You’re always welcome,” he promised, and his voice didn’t slur even though he was only just awake. See, he told himself, you are making progress. “So is cake!”

“Well, cake always seems key to my recovery when I’ve been ill, so I figured I’d make sure you were getting enough.” Hikaru turned her grin on Lantis. “I even brought enough for you - are you still reading those annual reports?”

Eagle pushed himself up to sit against the end of the bed, instead of curling over Lantis’s chest. The other man was setting aside the sheaf of papers he’d been reading through, moving his legs out of the way so there was room for Hikaru to set first the tray and then herself on the bed with them.

“Yes, though I fear I have read as much as I can comprehend this evening," Lantis said. "The cake is very timely. How was your day?”

“Oh, long, but not bad - I had gymnastics club and then cram school this evening so I’ve still got a chunk of reading for literature tomorrow, but I think I’ve worked out the maths I was struggling with on Monday. Umi showed me a trick to memorising the formulas - here, Eagle, have a sandwich? I’ll get in trouble if I only feed you cake. You too, Lantis - but I’ll go over that tomorrow night, we have a test on Friday and I’ll see how well it sticks this time!”

Neither of them mentioned the missing equipment, and they surrounded him with a warm bubble of conversation, plying him with food as they chatted. (It was good cake, too.) Eagle nudged Hikaru with his foot once she had set her own plate down, and nodded at her bag. “Is your reading still that story about the two families who went to war over who should rule?”

“Yes - the next section. I still haven’t managed to get through it. Would you mind if I read it out loud?”

“Please,” Eagle asked her, and curled in against Lantis’s shoulder again. “It’s a good story.”

Hikaru dug in her bag and pulled out the heavy volume, pulling a face at it. “It’s a long story.”

“It’s nice to know more of the land you come from,” Lantis said, quietly. “Even old stories. And didn’t you say this one is true?”

“Well, somewhat - that’s what we’re meant to be discussing tomorrow. If you’re sure, then…” She turned back a couple of pages and picked up where she had stopped reading to them the week before, and her voice pulled Eagle to a world far away from the one where he was wrung-out and limp. Not that Lantis was any less fascinated; he was the one who interrupted the most, asking questions about names that they didn’t recognise, and so on.

So it was a bad day, but a pretty good evening. 

oOo


End file.
